Sunday, September 19, 2010

Up!

Up is the tale of Carl Fredrickson an elderly man who escapes being sent to a retirement home by attaching a TON of balloons to his house and manages to fly away to Paradise Falls, where he and his late wife always dreamed of going. After he is up high in the sky, a young boy is on his patio who he lets in and continues his adventure with the child. After a storm throws them around for a while, they find themselves landing on a great plateau across a large ravine facing Paradise Falls. With their body weight providing ballast allowing Carl and Russell to pull the floating house, the two begin to walk around the ravine, hoping to reach the falls while there's still enough helium in the balloons to keep the house afloat. As they walk towards Paradise Falls, Russell finds a colorful tropical flightless bird, which he names Kevin, not realizing that the bird is actually female. They later run into a dog named Dug wearing a translating collar that lets him speak. They discover Dug's owner is an older Charles Muntz, who has returned to South America with his immense dirigible for several decades to find and bring back a large species of bird (which turns out to be Kevin) in order to restore his reputation after bringing back a skeleton of the bird and being called a fraud because scientists thought he faked the evidence. Muntz invites Carl and Russel into his dirigible and Carl is initially thrilled to meet his hero. However, when Carl realizes that Muntz is after Kevin and will kill without a moment's thought in order to capture her alive, he takes steps to save the bird and escape from Muntz. Thanks to Kevin and Dug they flee the dirigible and escape Muntz's pack of vicious dogs, led by Alpha, but Kevin is injured during the escape. As Carl and Russell assist the injured Kevin to her chicks, Muntz and his dogs arrive in his airship, led by a tracking device in Dug's collar, and sets a fire under Carl's house, forcing Carl to choose his house over Kevin. Muntz and his dogs quickly capture the bird and fly off.

Before I ruin the ending, UP is a great movie for people of all ages. I'm 20 and saw this in the theater multiple times, it is now on DVD so rent it, watch it on stars, redbox it but it is a definite watch!

I really loved this movie. It did make me cry at times, especially at the beginning, with the flash through Mr. Frederickson's life. To me, UP is proof that the industry, while saturated with X against Y for Z movies, has some gems left.